CHAPTER 8

Hawthorne's
Blithedale Romance

NO OTHER book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual,
and so complete as The Scarlet Letter: this great allegory of
the triumph of sin.

Sin is a queer thing. It isn't the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one's
own integrity.

For instance, the sin in Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale's
case was a sin because they did what they thought? it wrong to do.
If they had really wanted to be lovers, and if they had had the
honest courage of their own passion, there would have been
no sin, even had the desire been only momentary.

But if there had been no sin, they would have lost half the
fun, or more, of the game.

It was this very doing of the thing that they themselves
believed to be wrong, that constituted the chief harm of the
act. Man invents sin, in order to enjoy the feeling of being
naughty. Also, in order to shift the responsibility for his own
acts. A Divine Father tells him what to do. And man is naughty
and doesn't obey. And then shiveringly, ignoble man lets
down his pants for a flogging.

If the Divine Father doesn't bring on the flogging, in this
life, then Sinful Man shiveringly awaits his whipping in the
afterlife.

Bah, the Divine Father, like so many other Crowned Heads,
has abdicated his authority. Man can sin as much as he
likes.

There is only one penalty: the loss of his own integrity.
Man should never do the thing he believes to be wrong. Because
if he does, he loses his own singleness, wholeness, natural
honour.

If you want to do a thing, you've either got to believe,
sincerely, that its your true nature to do this thing - or else
you've got to let it alone.

Believe in your own Holy Ghost. Or else, if you doubt,
abstain.

A thing that you sincerely believe in cannot be wrong,
because belief does not come at will. It comes only from the
Holy Ghost within. Therefore a thing you truly believe in,
cannot be wrong.

But there is such a thing as spurious belief. There is such
a thing as evil belief: a belief that one cannot do wrong. There is
also such a thing as a half-spurious belief. And this is rottenest
of all. The devil lurking behind the cross.

So there you are. Between genuine belief, and spurious
belief, and half-genuine belief, you're as likely as not to be
in a pickle. And the half-genuine belief is much the dirtiest,
and most deceptive thing in life.

Hester and Dimmesdale believed in the Divine Father, and
almost gloatingly sinned against Him. The Allegory of Sin.

Pearl no longer believes in the Divine Father. She says so.
She has no Divine Father. Disowns Papa both big and little.

So she can't sin against him.

What will she do, then, if she's got no god to sin against?
Why, of course, she'll not be able to sin at all. She'll go her
own way gaily, and do as she likes, and she'll say, afterwards,
when she's made a mess: 'Yes, I did it. But I acted for the
best, and therefore I am blameless. It's the other person's fault.
Or else it's Its fault.'

She will be blameless, will Pearl, come what may.

And the world is simply a string of Pearls today. And
America is a whole rope of these absolutely immaculate
Pearls, who can't sin, let them do what they may, because
they've no god to sin against. Mere men, one after another.
Men with no ghost to their name.

Pearls!

Oh, the irony, the bitter, bitter irony of the name! Oh
Nathaniel, you great man! Oh, America, you Pearl, you Pearl
without a blemish!

How can Pearl have a blemish, when there's no one but
herself to judge Herself? Of course she'll be immaculate, even
if, like Cleopatra, she drowns a lover a night in her dirty Nile.
The Nilus Flux of her love.

Candida!

By Hawthorne's day it was already Pearl. Before swine, of
course. There never yet was a Pearl that wasn't cast before
swine.

It's part of her game, part of her pearldom.

Because when Circe lies with a man, he's a swine after it, if
he wasn't one before. Not she. Circe is the great white impeccable Pearl.

And yet, oh, Pearl, there's a Nemesis even for you.

There's a Doom, Pearl.

Doom! What a beautiful northern word. Doom.

The doom of the Pearl.

Who will write that Allegory?

Here's what the Doom is, anyhow.

When you don't have a Divine Father to sin against; and
when you don't sin against the Son; which the Pearls don't,
because they all are very strong on LOVE, stronger on LOVE
than on anything: then there's nothing left for you to sin
against except the Holy Ghost.

Now, Pearl, come, let's drop you in the vinegar.

And it's a ticklish thing sinning against the Holy Ghost.
'It shall not be forgiven him.'

Didn't I tell you there was Doom?

It shall not be forgiven her.

The Father forgives: the Son forgives: but the Holy Ghost
does not forgive. So take that.

The Holy Ghost doesn't forgive because the Holy Ghost is
within you. The Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in
your conceit of your ego, you make a break in your own YOU,
in your own integrity, how can you be forgiven? You might
as well make a rip in your own bowels. You know if you rip
your own bowels they will go rotten and you will go rotten.
And there's an end of you, in the body.

The same if you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost.
You go soul-rotten. Like the Pearls.

These dear Pearls, they do anything they like, and remain
pure. Oh, purity!

But they can't stop themselves from going rotten inside.
Rotten Pearls, fair outside. Their souls smell, because their
souls are putrefying inside them.

The sin against the Holy Ghost.

And gradually, from within outwards, they rot. Some form
of dementia. A thing disintegrating. A decomposing psyche.
Dementia.

Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius.

Watch these Pearls, these Pearls of modern women. Particularly American women. Battening
on love. And fluttering
in the first batlike throes of dementia.

You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go
rotten inside you.

Hawthorne's other books are nothing compared to The
Scarlet Letter.

But there are good parables, and wonderful dark glimpses
of early Puritan America, in Twice Told Tales.

The House of the Seven Gables has 'atmosphere'. The passing
of the old order of the proud, bearded, black-browed Father:
an order which is slowly ousted from life, and lingeringly
haunts the old dark places. But comes a new generation to
sweep out even the ghosts, with these new vacuum cleaners.
No ghost could stand up against a vacuum cleaner.

The new generation is having no ghosts or cobwebs. It is
setting up in the photography line, and is just going to make
a sound financial thing out of it. For this purpose all old hates
and old glooms, that belong to the antique order of Haughty
Fathers, all these are swept up in the vacuum cleaner, and
the vendetta-born young couple effect a perfect understanding
under the black cloth of a camera and prosperity. Vivat
Industria!

Oh, Nathaniel, you savage ironist! Ugh, how you'd have
hated it if you'd had nothing but the prosperous 'dear' young
couple to write about! If you'd lived to the day when America
was nothing but a Main Street.

The Dark Old Fathers.

The Beloved Wishy-Washy Sons.

The Photography Business.

? ? ?

Hawthorne came nearest to actuality in the Blithedale
Romance. This novel is a sort of picture of the notorious Brook
Farm experiment. There the famous idealists and transcen-
dentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber
in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the
while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and
tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of
a super-celestial harp. An old twang of the Crevecoeur
instrument.

Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn't stand
one another. And all the music they made was the music of
their quarrelling.

You can't idealize hard work. Which is why America invents
so many machines and contrivances of all sort: so that they
need do no physical work.

And that's why the idealists left off brookfarming, and took
to bookfarming.

Man is made up of a dual consciousness, of which the two
halves are most of the time in opposition to one another - and
will be so as long as time lasts.

You've got to learn to change from one consciousness to
the other, turn and about. Not to try to make either absolute,
or dominant. The Holy Ghost tells you the how and when.

Never did Nathaniel feel himself more spectral - of course
he went brookfarming - than when he w as winding the horn
in the morning to summon the transcendental labourers to
their tasks, or than when marching off with a hoe ideally to hoe
the turnips, 'Never did I feel more spectral,' says Nathaniel.

Never did I feel such a fool, would have been more to the
point.

Farcical fools, trying to idealize labour. You'll never succeed
in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth
you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man
works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes his idealism, the
darker his mind. And the harder a man works, at mental
labour, at idealism, at transcendental occupations, the thinner
becomes his blood, and the more brittle his nerves.

Oh, the brittle-nerved brookfarmers!

You've got to be able to do both: the mental work, and
the brute work. But be prepared to step from one pair of shoes
into another. Don't try and make it all one pair of shoes.

The attempt to idealize the blood!

Nathaniel knew he was a fool, attempting it.

He went home to his amiable spouse and his sanctum
sanctorum of a study.

Nathaniel!

But the Blithedale Romance. It has a beautiful, wintry-evening
farm-kitchen sort of opening.

Dramatis Personae:

1. I. The narrator: whom we will call Nathaniel. A wisp of
a sensitive, withal deep, literary young man no longer so
very young.

2. Zenobia: a dark, proudly voluptuous clever woman with
a tropical flower in her hair. Said to be sketched from
Margaret Fuller, in whom Hawthorne saw some 'evil
nature'. Nathaniel was more aware of Zenobia's voluptu-
ousness than of her 'mind'.

3. Hollingsworth: a black-bearded blacksmith with a deep-
voiced lust for saving criminals. Wants to build a great
Home for these unfortunates.

4. Priscilla: a sort of White Lily, a clinging little mediumistic
sempstress who has been made use of in public seances. A
sort of prostitute soul.

5. Zenobia's Husband: an unpleasant decayed person with
magnetic powers and teeth full of gold - or set in gold. It
is he who has given public spiritualist demonstrations, with
Priscilla for the medium. He is of the dark, sensual, decayed-
handsome sort, and comes in unexpectedly by the back door.

PLOT I. - I, Nathaniel, at once catch cold, and have to be
put to bed. Am nursed with inordinate tenderness by the
blacksmith, whose great hands are gentler than a woman's,
etc.

The two men love one another with a love surpassing the
love of women, so long as the healing-and-salvation business
lasts. When Nathaniel wants to get well and have a soul of
his own, he turns with hate to the black-bearded, booming
salvationist, Hephaestos of the underworld. Hates him,for
tyrannous monomania.

PLOT II. - Zenobia, that clever lustrous woman, is fascin-
ated by the criminal-saving blacksmith, and would have him
at any price. Meanwhile she has the subtlest current of under-
standing with the frail but deep Nathaniel. And she takes the
White Lily half-pityingly, half contemptuously under a rich
and glossy dark wing.

PLOT III. - The blacksmith is after Zenobia, to get her
money for his criminal asylum: of which, of course, he will
be the first inmate.

PLOT IV. - Nathaniel also feels his mouth watering for the
dark-luscious Zenobia.

PLOT V. - The White Lily, Priscilla, vaporously festering,
turns out to be the famous Veiled Lady of public spiritualist
shows: she whom the undesirable Husband, called the
Professor, has used as a medium. Also she is Zenobia's half-
sister.

Debacle

Nobody wants Zenobia in the end. She goes off without her
flower. The blacksmith marries Priscilla. Nathaniel dribblingly confesses that he, too, has
loved Prissy all the while.
Boo-hoo!

Conclusion

A few years after, Nathaniel meets the blacksmith in a
country lane near a humble cottage, leaning totteringly on
the arm of the frail but fervent Priscilla. Gone are all dreams
of asylums, and the saviour of criminals can't even save
himself from his own Veiled Lady.

There you have a nice little bunch of idealists, transcentalists, brookfarmers, and disintegrated
gentry. All going
slightly rotten.

Two Pearls: a white Pearl and a black Pearl: the latter more
expensive, lurid with money.

The white Pearl, the little medium, Priscilla, the imitation
pearl, has truly some 'supernormal' powers. She could drain
the blacksmith of his blackness and his smith-strength.

Priscilla, the little psychic prostitute. The degenerate
descendant of Ligeia. The absolutely yielding, 'loving'
woman, who abandons herself utterly to her lover. Or even
to a gold-toothed 'professor' of spiritualism.

Is it all bunkum, this spiritualism? Is it just rot, this Veiled
Lady ?

Not quite. Apart even from telepathy, the apparatus of
human consciousness is the most wonderful message-receiver
in existence. Beats a wireless station to nothing.

Put Prissy under the tablecloth then. Miaowl

What happens? Prissy under the tablecloth, like a canary
when you cover his cage, goes into a 'sleep', a trance.

A trance, not a sleep. A trance means that all herindividual
personal intelligence goes to sleep, like a hen with her head
under her wing. But the apparatus of consciousness remains
working. Without a soul in it.

And what can this apparatus of consciousness do, when it
works? Why, surely something. A wireless apparatus goes
tick-tick-tick, taking down messages. So does your human
apparatus. All kinds of messages. Only the soul, or the under-
consciousness, deals with these messages in the dark, in the
under-conscious. Which is the natural course of events.

But what sorts of messages ? All sorts. Vibrations from the
stars, vibrations from unknown magnetos, vibrations from
unknown people, unknown passions. The human apparatus
receives them all and they are all dealt with in the under-
conscious.

There are also vibrations of thought, many, many. Necessary
to get the two human instruments in key.

There may even be vibrations of ghosts in the air. Ghosts
being dead wills, mind you, not dead souls. The soul has
nothing to do with these dodges.

But some unit of force may persist for a time, after the death
of an individual - some associations of vibrations may linger
like little clouds in the etheric atmosphere after the death of a
human being, or an animal. And these little clots of vibration
may transfer themselves to the conscious-apparatus of the
medium. So that the dead son of a disconsolate widow may
send a message to his mourning mother to tell her that he owes
Bill Jackson seven dollars: or that Uncle Sam's will is in
the back of the bureau: and cheer up, Mother, I'm all
right.

There is never much worth in these 'messages', because they
are never more than fragmentary items of dead, disintegrated
consciousness. And the medium has, and always will have,
a hopeless job, trying to disentangle the muddle of mess-
ages.

Again, coming events may cast their shadow before. The
oracle may receive on her conscious-apparatus material vibra-
tions to say that the next great war will break out in 1925. And
in so far as the realm of cause-and-effect is master of the living
soul, in so far as events are mechanically maturing, the forecast
may be true.

But the living souls of men may upset the mechanical march
of events at any moment.

Rien de certain.

Vibrations of subtlest matter. Concatenations of vibrations
and shocks! Spiritualism.

And what then? It is all just materialistic, and a good deal
is, and always will be, charlatanry.

Because the real human soul, the Holy Ghost, has its own
deep prescience, which will not be put into figures, but flows
on dark, a stream of prescience.

And the real human soul is too proud, and too sincere in its
belief in the Holy Ghost that is within, to stoop to the
practices of these spiritualist and other psychic tricks of
material vibrations.

Because the first part of reverence is the acceptance of the
fact that the Holy Ghost will never materialize: will never be
anything but a ghost.

And the second part of reverence is the watchful observance
of the motions, the comings and goings within us, of the Holy
Ghost, and of the many gods that make up the Holy
Ghost.

The Father had his day, and fell.

The Son has had his day, and fell.

It is the day of the Holy Ghost.

But when souls fall corrupt, into disintegration, they have
no more day. They have sinned against the Holy Ghost.

These people in Blithedale Romance have sinned against the
Holy Ghost, and corruption has set in.

All, perhaps, except the I, Nathaniel. He is still a sad, integral
consciousness.

But not excepting Zenobia. The Black Pearl is rotting down.
Fast. The cleverer she is, the faster she rots.

And they are all disintegrating, so they take to psychic
tricks. It is a certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche
in a man, and much more so in a woman, when she takes to
spiritualism, and table-rapping, and occult messages, or witch-
craft and supernatural powers of that sort. When men want
to be supernatural, be sure that something has gone wrong in
their natural stuff. More so, even, with a woman.

And yet the soul has its own profound subtleties of knowing.
And the blood has its strange omniscience.

But this isn't impudent and materialistic, like spiritualism
and magic and all that range of pretentious supernaturalism.